Even with the unraveling of his gang, Rosario Borgia exuded confidence. He had been in tight jams before and always found a way to wriggle out. Sure, he might have to spend some time behind bars, but he’d eventually get sprung and start over. No matter what prosecutors tried to prove, Borgia hadn’t fired a single shot. The boys had done all the dirty work for him.
For $3,000 in cash, Borgia hired the high-powered Cleveland law firm of Bernsteen & Bernsteen to represent him. Abram E. Bernsteen, age forty-two, and his brother, Max, age thirty-six, had been in general practice for more than a decade and were “connected with much important litigation.” A.E. Bernsteen, who was unmarried and lived with his parents, was highly regarded in legal circles. As the Journal of the Cleveland Bar Association noted, “His swift and sure perception of the issues of a case, his ability of expressing himself with clarity carrying with it the force of sincerity and conviction won for him wide recognition as a corporate and business lawyer.”
The law firm enlisted Barberton attorney Stephen C. Miller, age fifty-five, who had enjoyed a “large and lucrative general practice” since 1890, to assist with the day-to-day proceedings.
Borgia’s lawyers quickly filed a motion for a change of venue, saying it was impossible for their client to receive a fair trial in Summit County because of overwhelmingly negative publicity. The team brought a stack of newspaper headlines to prove its point, but Judge Ervin D. Fritch was unmoved. The lawyers then filed several motions for acquittal based on technicalities. Those, too, were dismissed.
The Akron Beacon Journal, Akron Press and Akron Evening Times were filled with bold headlines about the Furnace Street gang. Photo by Susan Gapinski Price.
Jury selection began on May 7, 1918, and took three days to complete. The twelve-man panel consisted of E.R. Adam, secretary and treasurer of the Saalfield Publishing Company; Maurice Bettes, director of the Summit County Agricultural Society; J.B. Betz, a retired farmer from Norton; Charles Currie, former manager of Northern Ohio Traction & Light; Van Everett Emmons, an Akron real estate man; Otto N. Harter, president of Akron Pure Milk Company; Floyd W. Hoover, a Goodrich rubber worker; George C. Jackson, a commercial printer and former Akron council president; E.J. Larrick, district manager for Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance; Richard P. Mason, a Goodrich rubber worker; Bert T. Secrest, former secretary of Summit County Bank; and Levi Smith, a carpenter from Copley Township.
As was customary at the time, their names and addresses were published in daily newspapers without fear of reprisal or concern of intimidation. The men elected Currie as foreman and then spent the morning of Friday, May 10, walking along Main, Exchange, High and Broadway, surveying the district where Gethin Richards met his demise. Unlike the previous case, Judge Fritch ruled that Borgia’s jurors should not read any newspaper accounts of the trial, but he again declined to sequester them in a hotel.
Frank Mazzano declined to testify at his own trial in Summit County. The jury deliberated only forty minutes. Courtesy of Akron Police Museum.
Escorted by Sheriff Jim Corey, a handcuffed Borgia lumbered into the courthouse from the jail tunnel and was as impeccably dressed as ever in a gray suit, rose-striped silk shirt, floral tie, gray socks and black shoes. In opening statements before a packed house, Prosecutor Cletus Roetzel outlined the tragic circumstances of the patrolman’s slaying, while defense attorney A.E. Bernsteen told jurors that he would prove Borgia did not “abet or procure another” to commit homicide.
When Roetzel called his first witness to testify, it was like a bolt of lightning hit the defense table. Convicted murderer Frank Mazzano, the protégé of the Furnace Street gangster, casually walked past the open-jawed defendant and took a seat on the stand. Mazzano, who barely made a peep during his own trial, was about to sing like a canary. As Roetzel later explained:
Mazzano summoned me to the county jail the day after his conviction and told me he wanted to go on the stand and tell the whole truth. I told him I could promise him nothing and that if he confessed he would be doing so upon his own responsibility. He insisted and said that he had killed Richards, that the jury’s verdict was just, that he knew he must die in the electric chair for his crime, and that he hoped for no reward for telling the truth…and that he wanted to relieve his mind of the awful weight of the crime he was carrying.
Borgia tried to make eye contact with Mazzano, but the kid wouldn’t look his way. Through the aid of interpreter Tony Jordan, Mazzano told the prosecution that Borgia had tricked him into not testifying in the first trial. Now condemned to execution, he had nothing to lose. “He told me not to tell anything,” Mazzano testified. “That it would be better for me. The night before I was going to go on the witness stand in my own case, Rosario told me not to go and that they wouldn’t send me to the electric chair. So I didn’t testify. He told me, too, not to testify against him and he would get me lawyers to appeal my case.”
As Borgia grew visibly agitated at the defense table, Mazzano spilled the beans. He explained how he shot Mansfield white slaver Carlo Bocaro at Borgia’s command because the Akron gang leader didn’t like him. He noted that Borgia also “had it in for” Sicilian rival Frank Bellini, the original target on the night Richards was shot. “Rosario wanted Bellini killed because they were bad friends,” Mazzano testified. The gang was considering hunting down Bellini at his North Howard Street home in the middle of the night early March 12 when the officer got in the way.
In a matter-of-fact manner that chilled listeners, Mazzano described the cop’s slaying as nonchalantly as if he were describing what he had for breakfast that morning. He, Borgia and Paul Chiavaro had just turned the corner from Exchange Street to Main Street when the patrolman surprised them at Kaiser Alley, he said:
There the policeman stopped us. He called “Hands up.” He had a mace in his hands. First, Richards started to search Borgia. Borgia caught Richards by the arm and twisted it behind the policeman’s back. Borgia then called to me, “Shoot him. If he finds the gun on us, we will all go to the electric chair.”
Then I shot. The first two shots didn’t hit the policeman. One of them almost hit Rosario in the head. He yelled at me, “What’s the matter with you? Can’t you shoot straight? Are you trying to shoot me?”
Chiavaro said “Go ahead and shoot. I’m watching. No one is looking.” Rosario had told Chiavaro to “Stand watch.” Then I took my gun in both hands and I shot Richards and hit him. Borgia left go of him then.
The prosecutor introduced as evidence the mangled .38-caliber revolver that had been found along the streetcar tracks near the scene of the deadly shooting. “Did you ever have that gun in your possession?” Roetzel said.
“Yes, that is the gun Rosario gave me,” Mazzano replied. “That is the gun I shot the officer with.”
With Mazzano on the stand, the sensationalistic Akron Press had a field day in describing Borgia’s reactions to the squealing backstabber. The newspaper painted a grotesque picture of a guilty man cornered like a rat: “His skin, usually an olive hue, was pasty. His face was a bluish-gray, resembling the color of wood ashes. His lips, dry and parched, were drawn back from his teeth in a snarl. His eyes narrowed to mere slits and his fingers twitched nervously.”
Borgia wore a frozen smile as his rival Bellini took the stand to corroborate Mazzano’s story. The businessman said that he and Borgia had feuded for years, and he didn’t buy it when the gangster called him to the Furnace Street pool hall with a peace offering. “It is lucky for Bellini that the gang didn’t find him the night Richards was murdered or he would not have been here to testify in this case,” Assistant Prosecutor Charles P. Kennedy told the packed courtroom.
Gang leader Rosario Borgia didn’t fire a single shot against Akron police and fully expected to be cleared of murder charges. Courtesy of Akron Police Museum.
Although there were dozens of witnesses yet to testify, defense attorneys A.E. Bernsteen and Stephen C. Miller knew they were already in trouble. They tried poking holes in the testimony of Mazzano, Bellini and other witnesses, questioning the accuracy of their memories, but the testifiers stuck to their stories. The defense had no choice but to put Borgia on the stand and hope that the jurors believed him.
On May 16, Borgia took the stand before a hushed courtroom. He said it was true that he carried a gun, but he said it was because he feared that Bellini would try to kill him. He admitted that he was with Mazzano and Chiavaro on the night that Richards was gunned down, but he testified that he parted company with them before the shooting. Prosecutor Roetzel pounced on the alibi like a hungry cat on a fat mouse. In a heated exchange, the two men duked it out in court.
Borgia: “When we went around the corner on Main Street, we walked a little ways and then Frank Mazzano stopped. ‘Well,’ Mazzano said, ‘I live south. I must leave you here and go back. I must go to bed.’ So I shook hands with him and started north.”
Roetzel: “And where was Paul?”
Borgia: “I think he was with Mazzano saying good night. I didn’t look. And then I…”
Roetzel: “Although you knew Paul lived on Furnace Street and would walk north, too, you walked off without him?”
Borgia: “Yes. When I got almost to the alley, a man came out and went past me.”
Roetzel “A policeman?”
Borgia: “I didn’t know. I couldn’t see. He went too fast and then in a minute I heard shots. Bang! Bang! Bang! And then I threw my gun into the doorway and walked back to the Buchtel and went to bed.”
Roetzel: “You didn’t see the shooting then?”
Borgia: “No, I never turned around. I didn’t know who was shot. I was afraid they might catch me with a gun on me and think I did it, so I threw my gun away.”
Escorted back to jail after testifying, Borgia exploded in rage. “I was there when Frank Mazzano shot the policeman, but I didn’t have anything to do with it,” he told New York detective Michael Fiaschetti. “The whole thing is a frame-up on me by those Sicilians. I’m a Calabrian. If I’m convicted and sent to my death, it will be because those crooks were able to make the jury believe their lies.”
During closing arguments, Assistant Prosecutor Kennedy told jurors, “If you decide that Rosario Borgia is guilty of first-degree murder, then you must vote for that verdict regardless of consequences. For if Borgia is found guilty of a crime which may cause him to lose his life, it will not be the jury, the prosecutor, the judge or the state which has passed that sentence upon him. It is his own deeds which will have condemned him.”
Defense attorney Steve Miller countered that Borgia was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time. “We are not here to rob the electric chair and we are not here to kidnap anyone from the penitentiary,” he told jurors. “We are not here to protect anyone guilty of the murder of Richards. The state has had its vengeance in the conviction of Mazzano. I could talk a week in behalf of Borgia because I believe he is innocent of the crime charged.”
The jury began deliberations at 4:25 p.m. on Friday and broke for dinner at 7:30 p.m. before reconvening at 9:00 p.m. Borgia went back to his cell, put on his nightclothes and went to bed, thinking no news was good news. Sheriff Corey arrived at Borgia’s cell at 10:30 p.m. and told him, “The jury has agreed on a verdict.”
As the boss was led away, Mazzano mused in his cell, “Here’s where Rosie gets his.”
The courtroom was filling back up when Borgia arrived. Defense attorney A.E. Bernsteen had gone home for the night, leaving Miller in charge as assistant.
“Have you reached a conclusion?” Judge Fritch asked the jury.
“We have,” foreman Charles Currie said.
Borgia scanned the faces of the jury for a hint as Currie read the verdict at 11:10 p.m.: “We, the jury in this case, being duly impaneled and sworn to well and truly try[,] and true deliverance make between the state of Ohio and the prisoner at the bar, Russell Berg alias Rosario Borgia, do find that the prisoner at the bar is guilty of murder in the first degree as charged in the indictment, and thereupon said defendant is ordered into the custody of the sheriff to await sentence.”
“What does it mean?” Borgia asked his attorney.
“Death chair,” Miller replied.